Disclaimer: I don't own Zim, Jhonen does. So there, you.
Yet another blast of pinkish light seared a smoking hole in the fence, dangerously close to Dib's head. Trying to calm down his racing heart, the diminutive investigator slumped in the grass. The front door, then, was definitely NOT an option. His devious alien nemesis had, seemingly, remembered to turn on his defences before leaving.
A grin spread across the human kid's face. His mind happily orbiting a planet where he, Dib, stood atop the autopsied bodies of a million life-forms, the scientific community applauding only him, Dib gathered his backpack and trenchcoat and prepared for another try. As if predicting that the human was about to make a run for it, Zim's accursed garden gnomes turned, each focusing its eerily-lit eyes on him.
"Hmm..." mused Dib, thinking out loud. It wasn't, after all, as if he had to worry about people thinking he was crazy. He had that well under control. Still, they would all see just who was crazy when he returned, triumphant, with the contents of Zim's house, his secret alien base of evil...
Snapping back to the present, Dib tried his best to focus on the task in hand, ignoring the delusions of grandeur doing laps around his neural pathways as best he could.
"Let's see... here we are..." muttered Zim's nemesis, pulling a brightly-coloured package out of his backpack and studying it intently.
"'Guaranteed to protect the wearer from all types of alien
surveillance', eh? That sounds about
right..."
Dib cracked open the cardboard packaging, removing an object which looked
suspiciously like a bicycle helmet, wrapped in tinfoil, with a couple of
springs shoved in for good measure. Still, 'Alien-Related Impending Doom' magazine wouldn't have voted it
their top piece of protective headgear for no reason... Strapping the unwieldy device on top of his
head, Dib took a few cautious steps out from the scant protection of the fence...
...and, remarkably, wasn't blown into a million smoking chunks of meat. Another step and, the smirk on his face growing, Dib found that he was still able to draw breath, rather than, say, having been punctured by a million white-hot rays of death. Walking with a little more confidence now, Dib quickly approached the front door...
---
"GIR! Stop that!" yelled Zim, making an ineffectual grab for his 'assistant' with one hand, while trying his best to steer the Voot Runner with the other. Thankfully, the robot had only managed to hit the remote controls for the house systems. Zim breathed a sigh of relief and settled back into his seat, a dark look on his face.
"Whooooo!" screamed GIR, hopping around frantically in the
back of the small ship. "We're
flying! WE'RE FLYIIIING! Hey... how are we staying up here?"
Zim sighed again.
"It's quite simple, GIR. You see, Irken ships work on a simple principle of anti-gravitational
f..."
Without even letting his master finish, GIR suddenly threw himself at the front
window, bouncing off and landing on top of even more delicate controls.
"WE'RE GONNA FALL! AAAaaaaaaaieeeeeek!"
Dib's furtive, nervous expression changed into an enormous grin, as his alien nemesis' front door beeped a few times and swung open. After a quick, grateful glance at the dark skies, the would-be investigator brandished his flashlight like a club and took as huge a stride as his short legs would allow into the house. Someone up there, seemingly having pulled their pants up, was finally smiling on him.
"GIR!" roared Zim, getting up from his pilot's seat and waving a finger angrily, as houses and gardens shot by beneath them. "We are not going to fall! Superior Irken technology, as much as I wonder about the term when it's applied to you, is perfectly reliable!"
The green-eyed Information Retrieval unit, either ignoring or not hearing its master, continued to dash from one side of the craft to the other, screaming at the top of his overworked voice-synthesiser.
"But we're in the AIR! We're gonna DIEEEEE! And I don't even have any crabs..."
"Be quiet, GIR. I
have to concentrate on finding the humans' pathetic entertainment
station..."
Zim, turning back to the small ship's controls, was taken completely by
surprise as GIR wrapped himself around the Irken's head in a fit of panic,
screeching unadulterated incoherence about fish, crustaceans and what sounded
to Zim like 'buttmonkeys'. After a few
seconds' token frantic scrabbling and muffled screaming, Zim managed to feel
his way to his seat, the terror-stricken robot still clinging to his face, and
sat down.
"GRmmmph. GmmPhmmMmm..." managed Zim, clawing ineffectually at the robot, who had completely forgotten his previous terror and begun to giggle. Unfortunately, this was the moment that, if he hadn't been being asphyxiated by a brainless SIR unit, Zim would have pulled the ship upwards. Since he couldn't see, the Irken's craft, unfortunately, ploughed straight through an advertising billboard ('Meat! There's animals in it!') and hurtled toward the bright lights of the city, belching smoke and shedding potentially vital components as it went.
---
"Welcome home, son!" chorused the spooky, automated parent-decoys, squeaking back into their positions at either side of the door, as Dib shot each a dark look and tiptoed past.
"Sloppy, Zim..." muttered the child, looking in wonder at
the oversized couch, pipe-covered ceiling and quite frankly bizarre
posters. "Nobody but an idiot
would be fooled by all this."
The thought suddenly occurred to Dib that all the kids in his class, Miss
Bitters and, it seemed, the entire neighbourhood had, up to this point, been
successfully fooled. This only proved
his point, really.
Hitting his forehead with a gloved palm, Dib winced. The camera! In his excitement at actually being inside the alien invader's house, he had completely forgotten to take any pictures... Still, there was more than enough time for that. Rummaging in his backpack, Dib almost failed to notice the scary, wide-eyed monkey picture which dominated the Irken's living room sliding upwards, revealing a huge screen, which flickered a few times and burst into life.
"Zim, would you stop leaving us on call-back?" shouted Red, tapping a finger against the screen to illustrate his point. "We know your invasion is going... well. We don't need to hear about it every ten seconds!"
Behind him, Purple was distractedly eating a hot-dog. Seeing what their ship's view-screen was displaying, however, the freakishly tall Irken dropped his meaty snack to the floor, his mouth wide open.
"Heeeey..." began Red, with the air of someone having made a great discovery. "You're not Zim..."
Dib grinned with malicious glee, snapping off a few pictures of the perplexed aliens on the screen in front of him, his mind racing with the opportunities this opened up for him. Seeming to notice that the figures on the screen were talking to him, Dib looked up and nodded.
"That's right. I'm not Zim, hideous alien... scum... filth... things!"
Purple sidled up to the screen, raising an eyebrow and regarding Dib's less-than-impressive height.
"Did you kill him?"
Red's eyes widened.
"Yeah, did you kill Zim? Please tell me you killed him..."
Dib looked confused for a moment, then simply went back to what he would have been saying if the aliens were acting as he'd expect them to. Being someone who spent most of his time in a paranoid delusion, Dib tended to hear what he wanted to hear.
"Oh, you might think you're so superior, up there in your... screen!" managed Dib, waving a finger at the Tallest. "But I now have proof! Proof that Zim is a alien! Proof that everything I've been saying is true! Proof that... that..."
Purple sighed. "You didn't kill Zim, did you?" he asked, resignedly. Dib shook his head, still grinning and clutching his camera and tape recorder, which had been recording throughout his brief exchange with the leaders of the Irken army.
"You didn't even hurt him a bit? Break his legs? Gouge out his squeedlyspooch?"
Dib shook his head again.
"Then where is he?" asked Red, looking
unconvinced. "You're sure you didn't
kill him and then forget about it?"
Dib threw his head back and laughed maniacally, then seemed to remember where
he was, and turned back to the Tallest, wiping a tear from his eye. Smirking, he waved the camera up at the
viewscreen.
"I didn't kill him, but I'm sure the government'll want a chance to see what makes Zim tick when they see this!" hissed Dib. Red and Purple looked impressed.
"Hmm... I wonder if Zim has anything else interesting in here..." said Dib, looking a little less intense and glancing at the technological mess filling his alien nemesis' house.
"So..." began Purple, looking at Dib in a new light. "You're saying that these... governments... will get rid of Zim for good, if they find out who he is?"
Dib nodded. The Tallest paused for a second, exchanging knowing looks.
"Ooh! Ooh! Look under the couch! There's gotta be something under there!" exclaimed Red suddenly, pushing his associate out of the way.
"No! Try the bedroom! There's bound to be something good in Zim's bedroom!" managed Purple, vying with his equally-tall co-ruler for space.
Dib stuffed the camera back into his pack, and wandered into the kitchen, leaving the two aliens, confined to the screen, to their argument.
---
"GIR! DO SOMETHING!" screamed Zim,
ineffectually wrestling with the ship's control stick, as the tiny craft
demolished street-lamp after street-lamp, each putting an impressive dent in
the Voot Runner's thin hull and sending sparks showering from the console. To one side of the stricken craft, Zim's
less-than-helpful robot giggled and began to dance.
"DO SOMETHING USEFUL, GIR!" yelled the Irken, as the ship bucked upwards and smashed into a road-sign, sending the pair rocketing up then down in a huge, wide arc, during which both managed to come to their senses and do the only appropriate thing, which was scream.
---
"Hey, Al, d'you see something just then?" asked the first scientist, peering out of one of the van's high-set windows. The second shook his head, continuing whatever he was doing.
"Coulda sworn something just shot past us..." muttered the first man, shivering a little in the cold night air.
"Wouldn't be anyone much out here at this time..." said the second, reasonably. The first nodded and moved to one side, revealing row upon row of tiny, liquid-filled glass tubes, some of which had contents which seemed to be moving.
"Couldya give me a hand here?" asked Al, fiddling with something hidden behind his hunched figure. On either side of the scientist's body, the van's dim light illuminated a glass tank, containing s miniature landscape of grass and trees.
"Yeah. It was prob'ly nothing..." muttered Trent, not sounding particularly convinced. After a last glance out the window, he joined his colleague.
---
A sudden shriek broke the stillness of the night a little, startling the few people walking around the city-centre at two a.m. It wasn't as if mysterious screams were anything unusual, anyway. The fact that it came from a fairly ordinary-looking white van parked on the streetcorner wasn't all that odd, either. Nearby, a cloud of smoke hanging over the city park was the only sign that something unusual had happened.
"GIR..." muttered Zim, clawing himself out of the ship's wreckage with a furious expression on his face, then flopping into a soft-looking bush. GIR hopped lightly out of the smashed ship, which was now resting in what had once been a flower-bed. His dog disguise was ripped beyond recognition.
"...are you sure you aren't trying to kill me?"
GIR nodded, sticking his tongue out. "I'm helping!"
Zim sighed.
"Well, at least we appear to be in the city..."
The Irken stood up, dusted himself off, noting his torn clothing, and regarded their surroundings with a fierce glare.
"Yes... tonight's operation continues as planned. No horrendous, catastrophic disasters at all. In fact, I am..." Zim paused, his face displaying something between uncertainty and determination. "I am, in fact, a fine example of the Irken species. Now, GIR! TO THE 'TELEVISION' STATION! ENJOY YOUR LAST MOMENTS OF FREE-WILL, DROOLING HUMAN BEASTS, FOR YOU SHALL SOON BOW BEFORE M…"
The crippled Irken ship chose this moment to belch another
cloud of smoke, obscuring Zim's words and sending the tiny Irken into a fit of
coughing. With a sigh, Zim picked up GIR
by the remains of his disguise and set off in the rough direction of the
television antenna.
---
After a few moments, a pigeon landed on the inconspicuous white van's roof, and picked at a few misplaced feathers with its beak.
"No, I... I don't want to..." said a small, timid-sounding voice, from inside the van.
"Yeah, I know there's space to fill, but how can I entertain
the people when I'm so miserable? I
still miss my monkey-friend..."
The pigeon held its head a little closer to the source of the weird noises.
"No, really, I don't feel like dancing..." continued the voice, sounding even more helpless with every word. Suddenly, a revving, grinding sound startled the bird slightly, making it hop a few paces down the van. This was soon replaced by a sigh, and a repetitive tapping, almost like small feet dancing on a metal surface.
But pigeons are stupid, so it didn't understand a word.